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10% Happier with Dan Harris

Sam Harris on: Vipassana vs. Dzogchen, Looking for the Looker, and Psychic Powers

10% Happier with Dan Harris

10% Media, LLC

Health & Fitness, Mental Health

4.6 • 12.9K Ratings

🗓️ 13 December 2023

⏱️ 72 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers.

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Frequent guest Sam Harris discusses life after quitting Twitter and the metaphysics of meditation along with special co-host and brother Matt Harris. 


Sam Harris is a neuroscientist, philosopher, and author of five New York Times best sellers. His work covers a wide range of topics—neuroscience, moral philosophy, religion, meditation practice, political polarization, rationality—but generally focuses on how a growing understanding of ourselves and the world is changing our sense of how we should live. His books include The End of Faith, The Moral Landscape, Free Will, Lying, and Waking Up. Sam hosts the popular Making Sense podcast and is the creator of the Waking Up app, which offers a modern approach to living a more examined life, through both in-depth mindfulness training and secular wisdom. Sam has practiced meditation for over 30 years and has studied with many Tibetan, Indian, Burmese, and Western meditation teachers, both in the United States and abroad. He holds a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA.


In this episode we talk about:


  • The psychological benefits of quitting Twitter
  • Vipassana meditation vs. Dzogchen
  • The practice of looking for the looker
  • Sam's views on the metaphysics of meditation and psychic powers



Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/sam-harris-2023

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. All right, we're going into the deep end today, kids, with one of my favorite repeat guests and a person I

0:24.4

consider to be both a friend and a role model Sam Harris. Sam is an author

0:29.6

neuroscientist and philosopher he's the author of many best-selling books, the host of a massive

0:35.3

podcast called Making Sense, and the creator of a meditation app called Waking Up, which is truly an

0:41.4

incredible resource.

0:42.5

He's done a great job with that app.

0:44.6

As I've mentioned before, Sam was a huge part of my own meditation career.

0:47.9

He encouraged me early on when I was still skeptical about the practice.

0:51.8

In fact, he got me in to my first retreat and

0:54.8

personally introduced me to Joseph Goldstein, the meditation teacher, who's

0:58.0

become a gigantic figure in my life. I have a co-interviewer for this episode. This marks the inaugural appearance on the show of a guy named Matt Harris.

1:07.1

So we have three Harris on the show. Although Sam and I share our last name, we are not related Matt and I however are very closely related

1:16.0

he's my younger brother despite the fact maybe because of the fact that I have been

1:21.2

meditating for 14 years roughly and despite the fact that

1:25.0

Matt has been one of my closest advisors on my various books and meditation

1:29.3

related projects I don't know if this is despite the factor because of the aforementioned either way he's never really gotten into the practice

1:36.8

However that changed about a year ago when he quite suddenly got deeply interested and one of the people he's really latched onto in his own

1:43.8

contemplative odyssey is Sam so I thought it would be fun to have Matt join us for

1:47.8

this conversation heads up we have basically the same voice although he does

1:51.8

tend to say smarter stuff than I do, so that's maybe how you can tell us apart.

1:56.2

We cover a lot of ground here, including the psychological benefits of quitting Twitter,

2:00.1

Vipassina meditation versus Zogue Chen, which is a Tibetan flavor of meditation, a practice called

...

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